Summer of 1988 - Sailing the 50' Newick trimaran Moxie from Martha's Vineyard to Newport, Rhode Island, a forty mile trip to the west, close on the wind all the way. We were going to greet the finishers that year of the Singlehanded Trans- Atlantic Race, the same event Moxie had won only eight years earlier, sailed then by 65 year old Phil Weld in just under eighteen days. Designed, built and proven as a thoroughbred ocean racing machine, Moxie was pure joy on a day sail like this. We had no worries about arriving well before dark and completed our journey in only six or seven hours...

On board was a fresh copy of Wooden Boat Magazine, July/August, 1988, Issue #83 with cover picture and feature article on "RUSSELL BROWN and His PROVEN PROAS"... I had met Russell two years earlier as he was hauling his proa Kauri for the winter on the beach (between The Black Dog Tavern and Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway) and had sailed enough on Kauri to "get" the Pacific proa thing from him.

That being my second season of three sailing Moxie, the world of big, fast, bluewater multihulls was easy to take for granted. Experienced multihull friends and teachers like Dick Newick, Russell Brown and many others on and around the Vineyard at the time, made it look easy to design, build and sail these incredible, fun machines.

I wanted a bigger version of Moxie with more room for cruising comforts, more capacity for sleeping people and carrying load, without sacrificing speed, of course.

It seemed to me that Russell was on the right track; the boat he created was an amazing experience when zooming along with the ama flying or skimming the surface and only one hull in the water. Kauri didn't have the power of Moxie but at 37 feet and less than half the weight, that was to be expected.

I could see scaling Russell's boat up to the displacement of a comfortable cruiser, equivalent in accommodation to a 40+ foot catamaran. The fact that it was sixty-eight feet long was fine with me as I had already been through the Gulf Stream in Moxie (racing to Bermuda in 1987) and believed fifty feet to be _minimal_ for those kinds of nasty conditions offshore.

Joseph Oster - sailing resume

 
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